Towards a TDD maturity model through an anti-patterns framework

TL;DR

This paper proposes a research project to develop a TDD maturity model based on anti-patterns, aiming to guide practitioners in avoiding common pitfalls and improving their test-driven development practices.

Contribution

It introduces a framework to understand TDD anti-patterns and their causes, contributing to a maturity model for better TDD adoption and practice.

Findings

Identification of common TDD anti-patterns

Insights into causes leading to anti-patterns

A proposed framework for TDD maturity improvement

Abstract

Agile software development has been adopted in the industry to quickly react to business change. Since its inception both academia and industry debate the different shades that agile processes and technical practices play in the day-to-day of students and professional developers. Efforts have been made to understand the pros and cons of the Test Driven Development (TDD) practice to develop software as part of a professional environment. Despite the effort of practitioners to list the TDD anti-patterns that unveil undesired effects in the code when practicing TDD, work is needed to understand the causes that lead to that. In that sense, this paper proposes a research project that explores the TDD anti-patterns context and what leads practitioners to face them in the software development context. As a result, we expect to offer a TDD maturity framework to help practitioners in the process of writing code guided by tests and prevent the addition of anti-patterns